Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why Read Online Free Page B

is turned. (And for “stealing,” read: leaking nudes, groping, or rape.) Yet most people believe that society would not benefit if the world were to devolve into one long, public orgy. Men want sex—all the time, and with everyone—but they can’t be allowed to have all the sex they want. So, with half the world barely able to restrain themselves from whipping it out on the subway platform, someone has to keep us all from wrecking our marriages and dry-humping each other in the streets. And this group (surprise) is women.
    As continually as men pursue sex, women are asked to refuse it. We’re the responsible parties, who hold the pizza above the dog’s head, where he can’t get to it. If we are good women (or “good girls,” to quote the infantilizing terminology of many occasionally Robin-Thicke-centric pop songs) we utilize sexuality only strategically, and only in the service of tricking men into getting married and fathering children. We are also paranoid and crafty enough to prevent anyone from “stealing” it when we refuse. We’re responsible, not for taking care of our own bodies and lives, but for keeping society intact.
    Once you’ve made women’s sexuality a load-bearingstructure for the social order, the obligations only proliferate. Soon, she finds herself not only responsible for tricking men into fatherhood, but for keeping the right team in charge as regards heterosexuality (consider how Lindsay Lohan’s downward reputation spiral was hastened by the fact that she dated a woman), race (how many jokes have you heard about Kim Kardashian dating black men?), class (a big complaint about Britney and K-Fed was not just that they had sex, but that they looked like “white trash” together), and anything else you can think up.
    The responsibility also hits women differently depending on where they stand in the social hierarchy. Surveying the grand tradition of Trainwreck Journalism, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s vastly overpopulated with young, pretty, blond white women. It’s not that society places some especially low value on white blondes; quite the opposite. All of the aforementioned ideals about sexual purity were constructed with white women in mind. Therefore, we treat their sexuality as an exception to the rule, a personal failing. Black women, on the other hand, have already been stereotyped as hypersexual and “impure,” and from them the same behavior draws not personal condemnation, but generalized racism; not shock or horror, but contempt. It doesn’t spare these women any unkindness, and it’s no more rational than the alternative—Taylor Swift and Beyoncé can both wear leotards and talk about their feminism at concerts, but only Beyoncé willhave the leotard cited as a reason she can’t be feminist—but it changes the angle from which we bring the hammer down.
    And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else : Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success has done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man’s game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj’s press coverage, outside the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.
    The Nicki Minaj Butt Conversation—whether she has had plastic surgery to enhance her butt, whether there is a sufficient amount of clothing apportioned to her butt,